With the growth of computer and information systems and related network technologies such as wireless and Internet communications, ever increasing amounts of electronic information are communicated, transferred and subsequently processed by users and/or systems. As an example, electronic mail, text messaging, facsimile transmission, and voice mail are all popular methods for communicating such information. In particular, with the advent of the Internet, exchanging email has become an important factor influencing why many people acquire computers. Within many corporate environments, email has become almost a de facto standard by which co-workers exchange information. However, with the heightened popularity of email and other information transfer systems, efficiency problems have begun to appear with regard to managing and processing increasing amounts of information from a plurality of sources.
One such problem involves redundant data entry. In other words, it is common for users to re-key, or re-enter, the same message data when transferring specific business function data through email. For example, a bank customer and bank loan representative can use email applications to define and communicate information regarding the terms and/or approval status of a loan application. After loan approval the bank loan representative is often required to enter the application information into a separate application used to initiate the actual loan process. Another problem many users face is the deluge of email and/or other information from which to sort through and/or respond, such that the capability of being able to send, receive, and process information has almost become a hindrance to being productive. For example, it is not uncommon for some users to receive more than one hundred email messages a day. With such large amounts of email and other electronic information, it has become difficult to manage information according to what is important and what is not as important without substantially expending valuable time to make personal determinations as to the importance. As an example of these determinations, users may have to decide whether messages should be responded to immediately, passed over to be read at a later time, or simply deleted due to non-importance (e.g., junk mail). This is particularly true because message traffic represents a wide range of content (i.e., personal, calendar, business function specific, and the like) and cannot be controlled with appropriate granularity.
Attempts have been directed at resolving information management problems. For example, attempts have been made to curtail the amount of junk or promotional email (e.g., spam) that users receive. Additionally, some electronic mail applications provide for the generation of rules that govern how email is managed within the program. For example, a rule providing, “all emails from address X” are to be placed in a special folder. Such attempts generally are not directed at the basic problem behind email and other information transfer/reception systems. That is, conventional systems often cause users to manually peruse and check at least a portion of some if not all of their received messages in order to determine which messages should be reviewed and/or contain data that requires further processing. As described above, this takes time from more productive activities. Thus, with the large quantities of information being received, there is a need for a systems and methodologies to facilitate efficient processing of electronic information while mitigating the costs of manual interventions associated therewith.